Table 13 or bust

New York is the epicentre of epicurean endeavour, where securing
a top table is - says our man of taste - top of everyone's menu

If I ever give up on New York, it will be because of
restaurants. For an adult in the city, restaurants occupy about as
much time in a day, and impose as many rules, and create a similar
insecurity or nameless rage, as school in the life of a child.
There are other similarities: going to the right restaurants is at
least as important as going to the right schools.

I don't think it is possible to overstate the dominance of
restaurants in urban life. They are the cultural focus and
reference, eclipsing sports, art, literature, entertainment, music,
drugs - and sex. You likely wouldn't have sex with someone who took
you to the wrong restaurant (or at least wouldn't be happy about
it). Restaurant reviews are like theatre reviews used to be,
defining a cultural consensus. Certainly people talk more often and
more passionately about restaurants than they talk about politics,
movies, or even real estate. Restaurant talk may be the highest
form of cultural sophistication and Zeitgeist connection. You're a
bore and rube if you haven't eaten where everybody has eaten - or
at least if you're not shaking with excitement about getting there
soon.

To be honest,if someone takes me to, say, a grim little
Japanese place for lunch, instead of a prestigious destination, I
drop them

Restaurant culture, which really did not exist before the
Seventies and which grew with the financial culture and the
explosion of personal wealth in the Eighties and Nineties, has
spread from the hippest neighbourhoods to the sleepiest. In New
York, Brooklyn, in the blink of an eye, became the culinary
capital, as well as a turf war of cuisine trends and food
entrepreneurs (indeed, if you are anybody who is anybody in
Manhattan, you now eat in Brooklyn).

As the poor are moved out, new restaurants move in - in New
York, the restaurants of the poor, the mosaic of ethnic food and
coffee shops, have moved along with them. The idea of the local, no
matter how far-flung your neighbourhood, has become an entirely
nostalgic concept. Actually, that is the concept: the local. Except
it is not your local, but some highly stylised re-creation of a
local, which now attracts people on an international basis,
crowding you out.

Modern life has become a three- and often four- or
five-meal-a-day restaurant habit. There is the breakfast meeting.
At one time, egg-white-only breakfast meetings were a behaviour
limited to fat cats - but fat-cat rituals are what we all emulate.
So now it's unthinkable for the rest of us to begin a day without a
breakfast meeting (the most important meeting of the day). We are
all would-be entrepreneurs, or creative collaborators, or producers
of you-name-it, trying to woo potential partners over porridge.

There are three new breakfast-meeting spots that have opened up
in my neighbourhood in the last year. Each of them started by a
would-be entrepreneur who, no doubt, having had many breakfasts
trying to forge a creative future, decided to go into the
restaurant business, without, by the evidence, knowing much about
it - hence breakfast in my neighbourhood is a terror of
disorganisation and new experiments in curing bacon. (There is, of
course, brunch, too. A no-reservation place on my block,
distinguished only by its amounts of butter and its close quarters,
has a three-hour line each Saturday and Sunday.)

And lunch. If you have an assistant, his or her full-time job
pretty much becomes getting you a daily booking. If your assistant
is any good at all, he or she will have narrowed lunch to four or
five places and have, by careful trial and error, measured how far
in advance it's necessary to call in order to avoid rejection and
disaster. Repetition - say, six months of bookings - will finally
get you a favourable database field and a reliable table (until
someone else starts to book who is yet more faithful or famous than
you, at which point you're downgraded). But, of course, if you
don't have an assistant, this is your full-time job. You can be
cavalier or passive-aggressive about it and not give a damn about
where you book at the last minute. But, to be honest, if someone
takes me to, say, a grim little Japanese place for lunch, instead
of a prestigious destination, I drop them.

And drinks. "Let's do drinks." "Sure, where?" "You choose - let
me know?" In New York, there is nowhere to have drinks. Or, in
fact, the whole city appears to be having drinks, but you can't -
that is, you can't drink at a table. Callow banker types crowd in
at the bar, but that is not meeting for drinks (that is meeting to
get drunk). In fact, meeting for drinks is not really meeting for
drinks - it's a territorial grab of enough real estate to fit a
table. You merit this space by how familiar you are, how successful
you look, or how pretty your companion is.

Dinner. Dinner is the "oh-f***" moment of the day. Unless you
have an assistant who has expertly troubleshot your social life, or
you are an out-of-towner who has diligently reserved the most
ecstatically reviewed spots a year in advance, or you have an in,
you're totally screwed for any day-of plan. In New York, there are
no reservations between 7pm and 9pm. Anywhere. Even a dreary spot.
None. Call ten places. Call 20. Nothing. Nobody even calls any
more. Instead, you call someone who might know someone who, hope
against hope, can swing it.

After dinner. This is the province of only the cool or the
abused. The cool have had sex with the personnel at appropriately
hip establishments and so accommodation is made. For the rest, it's
stand there, in a space too small to fit, and be forgotten about,
until enough human weight is displaced to need you to add to the
ballast.

A word about the money. There are three restaurant price points
in New York. The £7-£10 entree, which means, with appetiser, wine,
dessert, tax and tip, all in at £30 per person; the £16-£20 entre
e, meaning a total of at least £77 per person, or the £28-£34
entree, or £123 per person, double this to include all the other
meals of the day. Through the entire recession, many more
restaurants opened then closed. The only evident sign of distress
was that sales of bottled water went down. In the worst economic
calamity since the Great Depression, what you saw were not
breadlines but restaurant lines. What explains this? Perhaps it is
some faulty economic measurements. Economists say it's dire; but
anybody who has ever been out for an evening knows this must not be
true. And no, this is not a rarefied group of diners. This is a
whole city of them (there are more than 500,000 meals served every
day in New York restaurants, I read recently).

Or it could be that there is a rarefied group so exceptional and
unimaginably flush that it is buying for everyone else, that we
have become a city of guests or grovellers, or calculated grifters
in a perpetual cat-and-mouse game geared to getting someone else to
pick up the check. In fact, the real currency is not so much the
money, but knowing someone. "I can get a reservation" are some of
the most magical and commanding words you can utter. Indeed, in the
ideal restaurant no one would just get in off the street; every
customer would be known. The ideal restaurant, the most vaunted,
desired, and profitable, is really a club. The difference is that
clubs have obvious and clear rules, whereas at a hot restaurant it
is all hidden, interpretive, coded, under the table.

There are any number of levels of knowing someone. Bartender,
maitre d', chef, owner, is the ascending hierarchy. All can get you
in, but your treatment is better as you climb the ladder. The
relationships here are some form of noblesse oblige, or something
more like political patronage, or, less elegantly, that you are in
the system. If you have lived the right sort of life, then it's
possible you've been rewarded with a special number or e-mail that
gives you adequate status. Recently, at a sought-after
establishment, the e-mail I was using began to bounce (I have
worried that this is because I shared it with uncool people) and it
was clear I'd lost my advantage.

Owners of fashionable restaurants are the true princes of the
city. Keith McNally, who owns an archipelago of the most pursued and
cacophonous places in New York (Balthazar, Pulino's, Minetta
Tavern), might reward you with a phone number and a special rating
(there are, I understand, four levels of the McNally rating system,
with his old girlfriends at the bottom and Jude Law at the top).
McNally, having terrorised Manhattan, has now moved to London to
open a British Balthazar, for which he will surely be knighted.

For many years, I had a safe berth and an enviable table in the
front room at Michael's, on West 55th Street, among the most hotly
contested pieces of turf in Manhattan among media people. But then
Michael and I had a tiff, which at the time seemed worth taking a
principled stand about. The result was to cast me into a lunchtime
wilderness from which, several years later, I have never really
emerged.

Of course the ultimate status is not to know someone, but to be
known, for the restaurant to want you. This is naturally true for
all celebrities, but this is also often true for people merely
associated with celebrities. I once had a breakfast meeting at one
of the new breakfast places in my neighbourhood with someone of
reasonable renown, and now can no longer return because of the
unctuousness and obsequiousness and close-in touching with which I
am greeted.

It must be said, finally, that there is little pleasure in
restaurants of the new restaurant culture. The experience may seem
precious, because it might so easily be lost, or necessary, because
there is no other alternative, and beyond questioning, because the
world is as it is, but on any purely empirical basis it is
gruelling time served.

Only in the most expensive, ritualised and ceremonial
establishments (we're talking thousands per table) is there any
attention to physical comfort and the basic science of acoustics.
This is not only because the people in these restaurants are very
rich, but also because they are very old. One of the points about
restaurants is to feel young, or to be among the young, or, that
is, the right young - the young who can afford expensive
restaurants, albeit not as expensive as the restaurants for the
very old and rich. (Almost everybody on the Upper East Side, where,
in New York, the expensive and quiet restaurants are located, now
travels great distances to eat among the young and loud.)

I am sounding cranky, I realise, which is risky behaviour. You
will be shunned if you complain or grumble about the size of your
table or the decibel level or general environmental assault, or
ever actually try to send a dish back. There is no way, really, to
protest. There is a special sort of freeze for the restaurant
malcontent. Your companions don't want to hear it and, invariably,
even though paying huge sums to endure countless abuses, will take
up class arms to defend the wait staff and floor managers who are
doling out the abuse.

For their part, the restaurant personnel - a powerful downstairs
tribe that believes it knows and has experienced the full, naked,
ugly, vile, demanding behaviour of the upstairs tribe - treat you
like a mental patient if you dare to question them. There are new
technologies that ought to help represent an empowered consumer
point of view. Yelp.com, for instance, is designed to channel the
vox-populi concerns of the restaurant public. But Yelp.com is
divided between a majority of slavish and fawning commenters who
see their cultivation reflected in positively reaffirming their
fine-dining experience, and a woeful minority of obviously perverse
and choleric individuals.

It is possible, of course, to stay home. But no one does that.
Or, if you do, it is probably the first step in starting to think
about leaving the city. Why would you be here if not for the
restaurants? Oh, and the food. What is left to be said about the
food, the pork belly, the polenta, the pear and pomegranate salad?
Only that it has become pretty much the same everywhere.

Michael Wolff

Michael Wolff is a contributing editor for British GQ and Vanity Fair. He is also a columnist for USA Today, the author of four books and the founder of Newser.com. Follow him on Twitter at @Michaelwolffnyc